Children for ransom: Reading ibeji as a catalyst for reconstructing motherhood in Caribbean women's writing

This study is an attempt to provide a new alternative to understanding the way that motherhood and the mother-daughter relationship are drawn and conceptualized in Caribbean Women's Writing in connection to propertied relationships that concern land ownership and the female body. I argue that by invoking the metaphysical powers of the ibeji, the Yoruba belief that twins are spirit children that possess certain powers, we are provided with a new understanding of motherhood and are more fully able to comprehend the complexities that motherhood and the mother-daughter relationship entail in relation to the material world.Elizabeth Nunez-Harrell, in her novel When Rocks Dance, seeks to recover authenticity of the African beliefs in the ibeji to propose a new propertied relationship to the land for Afro-Caribbean women by supplanting Western economic power with that of an African pro-creative power. Edwidge Danticat's use of the ibeji in Breath, Eyes, Memory, serves as a connection between mother and daughter and the United States and Haiti that must be reconfigured for the women of Haiti to reclaim ownership of the female body and black female sexuality. In Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban, the ibeji represent the need to create a third space free from socialist model of Cuba as well as the imperialist model of the United States. Rather, a more broadly defined reterritoralized space in diaspora, that is yet to be determined, must be created and allowed to exist outside of the confinements of domesticity. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...